The Pomp Podcast - #375: Ben Cohen on The Mystery and Science of Streaks

Episode Date: September 2, 2020

Ben Cohen is a sports reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York covering the NBA, college basketball and college football. He is also the author of the new book titled: The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks. In this conversation, we discuss the NBA, the playoff bubble, Lebron James, Damian Lillard, Kawhi Leonard, the financials of the Golden State Warriors, Bitcoin, and his new book on the science of streaks.  ============================ Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link https://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. ============================ Coinbase Wallets are adding support for .crypto and .zil domains through their partnership with Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for blockchain domains. You can send money using these new domains instead of long Bitcoin wallet addresses, while also storing your domain in Coinbase's collectibles section. Go to unstoppabledomains.com in the dapp browser to register and manage your domains.  ============================ Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Ben Cohen is a sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York, covering the NBA, college basketball, and college football. He is also the author of the new book titled The Hot Hand, The Mystery and Science of Streaks. In this conversation, we discuss the NBA, The Playoff Bubble, LeBron James, Damian Lillard, Kawhi Leonard, The Financials of the Golden State Warriors, Bitcoin, and his new book on the science of streaks. I really enjoyed this conversation with Ben, and I hope you do as well. But before we get into the episode, I want to quickly talk

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buying and managing your domains today. No brainer. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Ben. I hope you guys enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to

make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Ben here with me. Super excited to do this. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. So Ben is one of the rare people who gets to write about the NBA all day and spend his time learning about that. He also, for those that are watching this rather than listening, wrote this awesome book, The Hot Hand, that we'll get into. But maybe Ben, before we get into the book, let's talk about your background and kind of how you started covering the NBA. Sure. Well, mostly by blackmail, which is how I got my job at the Wall Street Journal. I went to Duke, which is rumored to be pretty good at basketball, and wrote a lot about sports while I was in college. And I sort of lucked my way into an internship at the Wall Street Journal right around the time when the journal was launching a sports page in 2010. And I wrote

a bunch of stories that summer. I kind of kept my foot in the door. I was hired on a full-time basis a few years later. And then I started writing about the NBA in July 2014, which I remember very specifically because it was the day before LeBron James chose to go back to Cleveland from Miami. And to this day, I'm pretty sure it's because our sports editor looked around the room, realized that we did not have a full-time national NBA reporter at the time and thought, oh my God, we have nobody to write this story tomorrow when LeBron James decides to go back to Cleveland. Let me just, let me look around. And I was the first person he saw, but it was a really brilliant time to start covering the NBA. Because if you think about what happened right around that

time, I still have not covered an NBA finals that the Golden State Warriors did not play in. So it was right around the time the league was changing in a really interesting way. My first four years covering the league were all warriors calves steph curry versus lebron james last year was toronto and we've seen um sort of a reshaping of the league this season before the whole league shut down but um it's it's i i sort of couldn't have um had any better timing and it was by complete chance like total coincidence nothing to do with me and i've just sort of been trying to ride that wave ever since i love that so was the first story you wrote for the wall street journal in terms of like on the actual national basketball beat about lebron james going back to

cleveland in that new job it was yeah i mean it was it was uh it was it was kind of crazy right and um but one of the first stories i remember doing that first season that i covered the league um was about this guy named steph curry who was very clearly becoming a superstar um and i think since then i have probably written about as much about steph curry as like our finance reporters write about golden sacks i mean my coverage of the league really has been steph curry lebron james and james harden um for a bunch of different reasons i think all of those guys are really interesting in their own ways and they sort of reveal a lot about where basketball is today and where the league is going but um to watch a revolution in real time and to sort of have an

excuse to write about what is happening and just the incredible shifts in the way that basketball is played and how like 40 years of orthodoxy can get thrown out the window to the point that the way that the game looks now is almost barely recognizable from where it was five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years ago. It's really cool to write about that and to try to find ways to write about these global celebrities that we all watch on national television every night and to try to find new things to write about them after all this time. I love it, man. It's very obvious that you're passionate about this. How is it writing about sports in a non-sports publication? If you write ESPN, I'm assuming it would be different than working at the Wall Street Journal. What

are maybe the pros and cons or how you see that trade-off? The way I think about it is that my best stories, the stories that I really like doing have to appeal to people who know everything about sports and also nothing about sports. Like ideally, if I write a story, it would be interesting to someone who has read every story that's ever been written about Steph Curry. And it would also interest someone who doesn't even know who Steph Curry is or why the Wall Street Journal is writing about him. And so that's kind of challenging. And it has really sort of inspired me and prompted me to look for interesting, unusual, quirky ways into stories. And so I have written like funny stories

about how the Golden State Warriors locker room was in this civil war about their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches being taken away. But I've also written like, you know, hardcore stat nerdy stories, like explaining the value of Steph Curry, for example. It turns out when you write about the same team,

over and over and you're looking for new ways to explain why they're good and how they're good and and you know what made them good you have to look for all types of different directions but i think you're exactly right like writing about sports and writing about the nba for the wall street journal is just totally different from doing it just about anywhere else on earth because there has to be some sort of quantitative backing to almost every story that we do um even like the funny weird stories like you know players revolting about peanut butter and jellies what made that story interesting was the tension that like is rooted in numbers right what made that story interesting was that at the time that the biggest problem for the golden state warriors

was their lack of pb and j's in the locker room they were like 41 and 4 on the court they had no problems right it was a very first world golden state warriors problem and if it's just a random an NBA team, who cares, right? What made it interesting was that this team was so transcendent that the only thing they could really find to complain about was not having peanut butter and jellies on the team plane. And so that's cool for me because I always have to be thinking like, is this interesting to me who spends all day on NBA Twitter and listening to NBA podcasts and talking to NBA people? And is this interesting to my mom, right? Who only follows the NBA through my stories. Yeah. And the whole idea of this quantitative view of the world, you just recently

wrote this article about how much the guy who's guarding James Harden is getting paid. Talk a little bit about where does something like that come from in terms of an idea? And then what's the work that goes into actually producing a piece of content like that? So the guy who is guarding James Harden in the NBA playoff for the Oklahoma City Thunder is this guy named Lou Dort, who just kind of sort of sounds like an anonymous nba player right um he was an undrafted rookie last season every team in the league could have had him and every team passed on him he signed a two-way contract so he was in the nba and he was in the nba g league um and he ended up um you know signing this new contract with the thunder right before the playoffs that prorates

out to 155 000 he's an nba player who's paid like a first year lawyer there's like no one in the nba who makes less money than Lou Dort. And he finds himself with the hardest job in the NBA, which is trying to stop James Harden in a playoff series. And so that one-on-one matchup is this sort of mismatch for the NBA ages. It's like, if you watch that series, it is the most compelling thing on the court because here is the greatest scorer in the world. One of the best scorers in the history of the game trying to stop a guy who is making $155,000. And so that economic mismatch to me was so interesting. And so the story that I wrote was sort of crystallize that financial disparity that is on full display every time these guys take the floor. It also explains that both of

these guys in a funny twist are more valuable than their contracts. Every NBA star on a max contract is technically underpaid he would make way more money on the open market if basketball were like baseball and it had a free market but his salary is capped and his production is is far greater than the 38 million dollars that he makes but lou dort is also valuable because he is playing this really important role in a playoff series and he's being paid less than anybody in the league and so So that was sort of the crux of the story, the tension, like the quantitative part of the story. And then the qualitative part of the story is like, well, who is Lou Dort? Like, why am I paying? I know who James Harden is. Who is this guy guarding him? And so that meant talking to his youth coaches, talking to Thunder officials, talking to his college coach and just trying to figure out like, how does that guy who gets passed over by every team who is making like no money for an NBA player end up with the most important job in the NBA playoffs? And so that whole thing, it's a story that could appeal to someone who doesn't know who

Lou Dort or James Harden is, because it's really just a story of a guy who finds himself in this very odd, peculiar position in front of the world. But it's also a story that hopefully, if you do happen to know who Lou Dort and James Harden are, you could look at it and be like, well, I don't know how he got to this point. And also like, yeah, what is the deal with like a guy who is making $38 million more than the guy who is guarding him? Like, how does that play out? And so that was sort of the thing that I wanted to try to explore with that story. It's absolutely hilarious how much you can like, okay, who is this guy? And then you just described like this 360 analysis for everything from how much money he

makes to, to literally what his youth basketball coaches. Well, it's funny too, because I mean, you've had Daryl Morey on the podcast. And I mean, Daryl is like the smartest guy in the NBA. and probably the most interesting guy in the NBA, the way that he thinks. And, um, you know, what Daryl would tell you is that like the way to win in the NBA is to just reap value wherever you can. Right. So you get value from your max players, because if, if you could pay LeBron James, whatever you wanted, he would make far more than the $40 million that he makes. But in a salary cap league, you also have to go searching for ways where you can find value in guys that anybody can get, right? Like, James Harden's don't grow on trees. So you need to get value on your mid level

contracts, and especially on your minimum contracts, right? And like, that is what the best teams do. The Golden State Warriors were built on Steph Curry's bargain contract, like he had bum ankles, he wasn't paid that much. And they were able to build this spectacular team around him because he wasn't paid like the first unanimous MVP in the history of basketball. And so if you look back at which teams win championships and why, there tends to be a financial component to it. There are people on that roster and probably people who are producing far above their contracts that explain why they are good. Walk us through that same thought process for somebody like the Golden State Warriors when they go on this epic run. How do you think about

applying that mentality to that team? Which part? How do you find value or how do you find stories that people want to read about them. So the value, so like everyone knows that obviously Steph Curry, right? There's like the players at the top that everyone knows of, but how do you look at like building out the rest of the team and how important those players are for them to actually go on the Epic run they went on versus just, oh, you've got, you know, four of the best players and they're all on the same team. So of course they're going to win. So the amazing thing about the Warriors is that they were entirely built on financial values. So like Steph Curry signs a new contract in 2012, his rookie extension. He has bum ankles. He is not yet the superstar

that we have all come to know and most of us love. He is not even an all-star. But when the Warriors present him with this contract, a four-year $44 million offer, they both think they can get value out of that. It's life-changing money for Steph Curry, and it's not yet clear that he is worth more than that. But it's also a pretty big risk for the Warriors because if his ankles don't hold up, then they are overpaying for a guy who can't play. So what happens over the course of those four years, Steph Curry becomes a revolutionary basketball player, he becomes an MVP in 2015, when the Warriors win their first championship, he becomes the first unanimous MVP in the history of basketball in 2016, when the Warriors win a record 73 games. And like the

entire team is built around the fact that their best player is a bargain. Like in 2017, I think Steph Curry was not even in the top 75 players in terms of contracts in the NBA. And so then you look at, well, then what happens in 2016? Well, they're not paying their best player all that much money. And there is this infusion of money from a new national television contract that kicks in where suddenly every team has a pile of cash that they can spend however they want it because the salary cap shot up by 35% in one year, instead of being smoothed in over a certain number of years, there was this spike. And how does every team spend this pile of cash? Well, they all want to just lavish money on the top free agents. That happened to be the summer when Kevin Durant was

the best free agent on the market. And which team suddenly has the money to afford signing Kevin Durant, the Golden State Warriors. So because Steph Curry is making much less money than he should be given his production, and because every team suddenly lucks into this pile of cash in this one summer, this one anomalous spike, they were able to have Steph Curry and Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson and Draymond Green on the same team. And they send half the league into hibernation for the next three years and win three titles in five years. So all of that, they play a revolutionary style of basketball. They are thrilling to watch. I still think there is nothing more magical than watching Steph Curry play basketball. But the whole thing has this

odd financial underpinning that you wouldn't really um find unless you knew how to look for it like they don't exist if not for um this trick of financial accounting in this very strange way when uh when people talk about the gold state warriors and kind of they were playing just that style of basketball it reminded me of the equivalent being the uh the greatest show on turf when the st louis rams were just you know lighting people up it just felt like you know they were doing the same thing just on a basketball court right it's true yeah and and you know the thing that I love about the Warriors and the Rockets too, and what Daryl has done in Houston is that they have taken advantage of the three-point shot, right? So when the three-pointer

came in, in 1980, NBA teams dismissed it as a gimmick. I think it was like 2% of shots that year were threes. They just were not comfortable using it. And slowly that started to change and they realized the value of this shot. But something funny happened from 2008 until 2012, which is that NBA teams appeared to find the right equilibrium, they had settled on like 22% of shots were three pointers, and it stayed at almost exactly 22%. For five seasons, it was as if they had all realized, okay, like one out of every shot, and one of every five shots on a basketball court should be a three pointer. And then like, something happened that they all just realized, Oh, no, like, that's wrong. Like, we need to be taking more threes. And I think that

that ratio now is like, I think the rate is like 37% of shots are threes. The Rockets take more than half of their shots from behind the three point line. They're literally over 50%. And the thing that has always bugged me is this mystery of modern basketball. What took them so long? Like the, the fact that the three pointer is worth more than the two pointer is in the name of the shot, right? It should not have been really all that hard to figure this out. And yet it was, And teams took a really long time to figure it out. And what's changed in the last five years is that every team wants more shooting.

Some guys take lots of threes. Lots of guys take some threes. The best players, the ones who have changed the game, are the ones who have figured out ways to take new types of threes. So Steph Curry shoots off the dribble and James Harden shoots while stepping away from the basket. And Damian Lillard pulls up from 30 to 40 feet

and makes enough of them that it's a good shot for him. I mean, this is really crazy stuff that we're seeing. And it has resulted in a sport that looks almost nothing like it did a decade ago. Can you imagine like our fathers fathers watching the NBA then and now watching Steph Curry just, you know, dribble around and throw up what looks like a Hail Mary type shot with his shooting form or a James Harden literally looks like he's running away from the defender as he just throws it up. Like it's it literally is so different and what makes it interesting is that these shots are efficient for these guys they are such good shooters that they get value out of that like last year the isolation play

in basketball tends to be among the worst plays like you don't want to go one-on-one and take a contested shot you especially don't want to do that while you're 25 feet away from the basket and your body is carrying you even farther away from the basket like when james harden shoots he stepping away from the basket. That's never been done before. And yet last year, James Harden isolating was more efficient than the most efficient offense in the history of the NBA. The reason the Rockets did it was because there was a mathematical reason for them to do it. And those breakthroughs, which just seem so counterintuitive, that's part of what I love about writing about this league is finding those statistical anomalies and allowing the people

involved to explain them and like how they realize that this strategy is the one that can help us win in this zero-sum league when we are all objectively chasing the same goal, but only one of us is going to achieve it every year. So one of the things around the three-point shot that you as a former Duke fan will appreciate that I don't think gets enough credit is when JJ Redick was at Duke, he completely changed the way that i think people in college looked at a shooter right it wasn't this kind of uh let me spot up and shoot like i literally remember him running laps in on the baseline right trying to shed a defender catch the ball and he would catch it and turn and barely have time to look at the basket he would shoot and would go in to the point where like uh i'll

never forget i think it was the duke maryland game when he was maybe a junior or senior and they were literally chanting on national television, F-U-J-J, right? I don't think JJ has forgotten that either. But it didn't matter, right? And so how much of that plays into the college game evolving to some degree, and then it just carries into the NBA? Or do you think it's actually top down where the NBA game evolves, and then it trickles down to the college game? Yeah, colleges were ahead of the NBA on this. And I've actually talked to Golden State general manager, Bob Myers about this. And Bob has a really interesting connection to the three pointer. Um, when Bob was in college, he played for UCLA. He walked onto a team that, um, won

the national championship. And he is famously on the cover of sports illustrated, like hugging Tyus Edney after, um, his coast to coast layup that won the championship. Um, but the next year, um, they were upset by Princeton in the first round of the NCAA tournament. It's one of these great classic upsets of march madness that like you still see on television today and um when they usually when when when the camera in that game panned to the ucla bench looking for like that shot of agony that they were chasing they ended up showing bob myers and he is chewing his towel in disbelief like how did we just lose to princeton and when i went back and looked at that game and studied the box score it became very clear how they lost princeton took more than half of their

shots that night from behind the three point line. Their coach, this guy, Pete Carrill, who is sort of this Yoda of basketball was one of the first people in basketball to realize that, Hey, maybe we should be taking more of this shot that is literally worth more than the other shots on the court. I think he once said like, they're going to give us one more point. Like we should take more of those shots. And so it was always sort of an underdog strategy to launch three pointers. But, um, one of the things that Bob Myers, who literally built the team that changed basketball by taking a whole bunch of three pointers many years later realized in his experience at UCLA and playing Princeton is that there was a real psychological factor to watching

a guy make a bunch of three pointers in a row. Like sometimes it sounds crazy, but sometimes a three feels more like four, five, six points than three, right? There's like a, it's almost like traumatic. It's scarring in a little, in a way, if, if you see JJ Redick running the baseline and coming around screens and launching from 28 feet and swishing it, you're just like, what do I do with this guy? And I do think that there is something to that. It's not quite the same as a guy making a mid-range jumper or driving to the basket for a layup.

When a guy makes a three, especially a big three, especially when there is momentum on the line, that's when coaches call timeout and they're like, let's stop the game for a second, right? It literally is the dagger, right? That's why they refer to it. Uh, you, you recently wrote a book, um, and I'm going to read the, uh, the entire title here. So, uh, it's called the hot hand and it says, uh, what a billionaire investor,

the best shooter on the planet, the search for a lost world war two hero, Shakespeare's six legged assistant, and one strange night in high school reveal about how the world really works. Uh, talk to us a little bit about the book. I'm about 40% of the way through and it's fantastic. I highly recommend it for people, but tell us kind of what was the idea here. So this book really started with two Wall Street Journal stories I wrote a few years ago about the hot hand and the search to figure out whether or not it's real and whether we should believe in it. And usually what happens when I write a story for the journal is that by the time it runs, by the time I have come up with the idea and talked to people and written the story and

gone through edits, and it finally sees the light of day and people can read it for themselves. I am so sick of that story. And I do not want to think about it anymore. And the opposite happened with the hot hand. I could not get the hot hand out of my head. It was a story with incredible stakes and tension and drama for this fight over an idea, like trying to understand what's really real. And it was a story, this like generational saga in which the main characters were Nobel prize winners and NBA superstars. And I just found all of this irresistible. And I wanted to keep thinking about it and reading the hundreds of studies about the hot hand and trying to find real human faces to put on this phenomenon. And so that's kind of where it started. And

then it veered off into many different directions that I could not have anticipated when I decided to actually do this. I don't want to give away anything that you don't want to give away. So maybe how much do you want to say about does the hot hand exist? Well, even if there were spoilers, I think that whether or not the hot hand exists is kind of in the eye of the beholder. I think there are really smart people on both sides of this debate. And it really depends on what situation you're in. And if you are in an environment that rewards belief in the hot hand and rewards behaving as if you believe in the hot hand, or if you're in one that punishes it. And so this story, it's sort of a whipsaw narrative. That's kind of what I was going for.

And I want you to believe that it does exist, because I think we all do intuitively feel that it does exist. And then I want you to sort of question that belief. And then I want that questioning of the belief to sort of be turned on its head. So at the end of it, you're kind of thinking, well, I toyed around with this idea, and where do I land on it for myself? And, you know, part of this book is looking at those studies over the years, the last 35 years, but also like being able to enjoy the stories, the people whose lives kind of help illuminate this academic phenomenon that some of the smartest people on the planet, economists and statisticians and mathematicians and psychologists have spent thinking about for almost four decades, like this

idea that is rooted in basketball and yet applies to basically everything in the world. I think I write in the book that basketball happens to be this very convenient excuse to explore the rest of the world. And I really do feel that and there's really no better example of it than what we think about the hot hand. What's your favorite story from the book? Well, you know, there are a lot I mean, the book starts, the first chapter is about the creation of NBA Jam. And it's about the hottest game of Steph Curry's career. And that was kind of my rooting in this book, right? Like, you know, I have written a whole lot about Steph Curry, and I played a whole lot of NBA Jam. And it kind of makes sense that it starts there. But

it goes into crazy directions very quickly. I mean, that's the first chapter. The second chapter is about Shakespeare's plays in a play here, which I wrote long before 2020. And it's about the making of The Princess Bride and how unlikely it is that that movie was ever made, let alone became a cult classic and it's about a 20th century composer this brilliant woman whose music was basically sitting in a closet for almost a century um because she you know was in an environment that didn't allow her to get hot and there are stories about asylum judges and there are stories about a lost holocaust hero and how someone how these two um you know brilliant researchers were able to figure out what happened to him and there are stories about a lost

Van Gogh painting and baseball and auctions. There are lots of stories, but the making of NBA Jam and what happened that changed Steph Curry's life are some of my favorite stories in there. My favorite is the one that you start off with, which is you basically tell the story of how you had the hot hand one night in high school. What does it say about me that that was not my favorite story? Tell just the high level real quick. I read a lot of books, right? And as I read through them, I think I usually put them in categories like, oh, that's an entertaining book, but wasn't super informative, or that was informative, not that entertaining. Like this is one of the rare books that nails both of them. So this story

alone, right in the beginning, I was just like, oh, I can't wait to read the rest of this. Maybe explain how you got the hot handed why you were so surprised by it. Well, I was surprised by it because I was a terrible high school basketball player, right? I mean, that's the reason I was surprised by it. I'm really pathetic at basketball. But in one quarter of one game, I scored more points than i had in my entire career i think it was like 16 points i couldn't miss like i i just i kept throwing stuff up and it kept going in and um i quit playing basketball not long after that game um in part because i realized that i was putrid but but also because i realized that um you know never again i would i ever achieve that state in basketball but having the hot

hands stuck with me for a very long time like i had plenty of reasons to forget about how i was as a basketball player, but that night was not one of them. And I have this very clear recollection of that game. And it's strange, but I've actually realized that it's not all that strange because I think that all of us have brushes with the hot hand, whether it's in basketball or another sport or work or life. And those experiences linger with us. We remember them because for a very brief moment, we are becoming superhuman versions of ourselves. We're transcending our place in the world, whether it is at an office or whether it is in a JV basketball gym with like eight people in the stands. And I wanted to know more about that feeling and why it's such a contested, disputed, sort of devilishly entertaining phenomenon.

And, you know, when I started reading about it, you know, what shocked me was the highly counterintuitive conclusion of this paper that was published in 1985, this real classic in the canon of behavioral economics. It's a paper about the hot hand in basketball by Tom Gilovich, Bob Ballone, and the great Amos Tversky of Kahneman and Tversky fame. And what makes it a classic is the conclusion that there is no such thing as the hot hand. It's simply a misreading of randomness. So what we swear to be true is not true. And that was, it was so contrarian and so delicious to me. And so, you know, there are hundreds of papers about the hot hand since then, because of that really incredible finding that started this whole field.

And so once I once I dove into that literature, I, you know, was just sort of swimming around and refused to come up back to surface because it was so interesting. I love it. Where can people go find the book? Anywhere, everywhere books are sold. All right, so the hot hand. I rarely give book recommendations,

but this one makes the cut. So, well, you did a fantastic job. I'm so glad. Let's talk about the NBA bubble that is going on right now. How has that changed your ability to cover things and then kind of what have you seen from players, coaches, and staff that you've talked with

now that the bubble is kind of a couple of weeks underway now well i'm not there that's the big difference right um usually for the playoffs i would be in the arena you can go into locker rooms before and after games you can try to grab players and coaches and executives so to have conversations that you don't see on television that um help me with my stories and um you know help explain what just happened on the court um so that has been a challenge for sure But it's also just weird. There have been basketball games on from noon until midnight, playoff games. That doesn't happen either. So it's a really strange environment. And there are kind of interesting stories wherever you look, because all of this is happening so quickly and

in such an odd environment. And with so much at stake, what is going on in the playoffs now has almost no connection to where the basketball season was in March when it shut down. If you think about the way that the playoffs usually work, there is some sort of momentum, like you were trying to build toward the playoffs at the end of the regular season. That doesn't exist anymore, right? We had some like eight seeding regular season games to bring us into the playoffs. But the way that the Lakers looked in March has no bearing on like what they are going through right now in the bubble. So, you know, I think it'll be interesting to see what happens when the games really matter going forward when we get to the conference semis and the conference finals and the finals. The thing that's really been surprising is how high the quality of play has been. These guys were off for months. Some of them went the longest stretches in their lives without touching a basketball and you wouldn't really know it watching the game. Like, even though there are no fans, even though they're in this environment that is unlike anywhere they ever played basketball before, basketball is pretty good. And that has been surprising to me. And I think kind of gratifying as a viewer. Talk to me about Luka and kind of his rise of recently. What are your thoughts there? So this is Luka Doncic, who is this 21-year-old superstar, right? Really the face of the NBA for the next decade and beyond. It's his first playoff series, and he just looks absolutely brilliant. I mean, he is a sublime basketball player. And there are interesting things about Luca that, you know, you might not think from watching him because he doesn't look athletic, right?

He kind of moves slowly and deliberately and he changes speeds a lot, but all of that is intentional. So I wrote a story a few years ago, Luca was 16 years old, this Slovenian teenager who was playing in Spain when he decided to spend his summers flying halfway across the world and coming to this small performance laboratory in Santa Barbara. for a couple weeks at a time. He was a kid who was working out with NBA players. He was like this sandy haired teenager who looked like he had gotten lost on the way to the beach. And yet, he was doing things with his body and studying his biomechanics and training in ways that like you never see for a 16 year old. And part of what makes him such an unstoppable offensive force is actually the same thing as what powers James Harden's game. It's his ability to decelerate.

He has the fastest breaks in basketball along with James Harden. And once you understand that, you can kind of see how his game opens up from there. So his step back three pointers, it's all because of his lower body strength. His ability to sort of like weave and snake through the lane and try to find angles where they may not exist. It's because he has these biomechanical gifts that are invisible, but um but but open up everything about him so um so that is interesting to me about luca and then the fact that like several teams passed on him is crazy and and will only continue to look

crazier with time i mean this was a kid who was the best player in europe he was the best player outside the nba when he was 19 years old like european guys get drafted when they play like 10 minutes for their european teams he was the mvp of the euro league the mvp of the euro league final four and he led slovenia slovenia to the european championships like the champion of europe when he was 18 years old he was a generational talent in plain sight and the suns passed on him after hiring his slovenian national team coach the sacramento kings passed on him for reasons that i still don't understand the atlanta hawks traded out of the number three pick and they got another draft pick and they drafted trey young but that allowed the dallas mavericks to come in and swoop

up Luka Doncic, who looks like he is the cornerstone of a franchise for a very long time. And so one thing I did right before the pandemic was I actually spoke with a bunch of his teammates from Real Madrid who saw him when he was 15, 16 years old and watched him develop into this, you know, the really the best player in the world who was not in the NBA. And there's sort of a bias in the NBA against some of these guys. And you think like, well, how good can he really be? And all of these guys, these American guys who were playing in Spain and playing the best teams in italy and france and israel um i asked them like what did your friends say when

you said like this kid is the real deal and all of them were just like well none of them believe me like i knew that i was watching the future of the nba and i was watching him grow up and we were just astounded in every practice in every game and like i i would just tell my friends like you'll see like this kid is astonishing and we're all seeing that now i saw a video uh recently on maybe it's twitter um and it's luca i think it said it was he was 14 and he's basically in a gym he's tied to one of these like strength ropes like the farther you get out the more it gets tension on it and he's basically doing drills while getting hammered with a uh like a like a pad right so literally he's he's tied to a piece of rope he's like that's actually what it feels

like to try to get past Kawhi Leonard? Well, literally at 14 years old, he's like tied to this strength rope, right? And then as he's going up for layups, he's getting hammered with this pad. And all I could think to myself was like, at 14, we were trying to like find friends to go play, you know, basketball. Like, wait, what is going on here? You're playing NBA Jam. Yeah. And so it was just, I don't think I understood until I saw that video, how much work at a very young age he did in what i would consider a much more uh kind of professional arc right this wasn't somebody who just like was good at basketball and just happened to make the nba it looks like this was very intentional uh expenditure of energy uh and focus in order to be the best in the world

right and why was he able to do that because he was paid as a professional basketball player when he was 14 years old he was not an amateur he had no interest in going to college he was part of the Real Madrid system. He was a professional basketball player who moved from Slovenia to Spain to do what he was so clearly gifted at doing. And he was able to travel to Santa Barbara because he was not going to AAU tournaments in Atlanta. And so it really is a validation of the European model of developing players. But he's also just a freak talent. I mean, when you watch him the thing that i love about luca is that you could know nothing about basketball and watch him play for a few minutes and you will just be drawn to him he's magnetic right he is a really compelling

force and the best players on earth are the ones who sort of pass that alien test where you can just drop anyone into a gym and say who interests you like if you watch steph curry you cannot take your eyes off of him when he is rolling right you just want to be like who is that guy and like why am I so drawn to him? And I think Luca is like that. I mean, he's 21 years old. He is doing things he has never done before. And he's doing them in ways that really nobody has ever done before at that age. And it's going to be really exciting to watch his career develop over the next few years. I mean, 21, most guys aren't out of college, right? It's nuts. You've also covered a whole bunch of other stuff during the pandemic,

one of them being Fauci and kind of his maybe intersection with sports and in that whole world, including his now infamous opening night pitch where he, I don't know how to even describe it. He just didn't have a good pitch, I guess, is the best way to describe it. Talk a little bit about like,

what's the fascination there? Why find him so interesting? So I thought he was really interesting in like January and February. I was sort of hanging on to his every word before most people even realized who he was. And so on March 11th, which most people remember for how it ended, right? That was the night that Tom Hanks tested positive, Rudy Gobert tested positive, and the NBA shut down. It's harder to remember how it began.

And it began with a congressional hearing in which Tony Fauci was testifying. And a congressman asked him, this was a few days after the Ivy League had canceled its men's and women's basketball tournaments, whereas the NBA was playing games in full arenas in the biggest cities in the country. And there was clearly this divide there, right? And so the congressman said, who is right here? Is the Ivy League overreacting or is the NBA underreacting? And Tony Fauci said in front of America, it's time for the NBA to start playing in empty arenas. The NBA is not the one that's in the right here, and they need to respond. And that was really interesting. And so a few hours later, of course, the whole season gets shut down. But I just thought, well, who is this guy who is telling the NBA to stop playing?

And of course, he is the nation's top expert on infectious diseases. He has served six presidents over three decades. But when I looked into his backstory, I found that he had this really interesting connection to sports. He was a sports-obsessed kid in Brooklyn. He played baseball in Brooklyn Sandlots. He was the captain of his high school basketball team, which is not something you would expect when you look at him.

And he's like 5'3 and 79 years old. But so I called up a bunch of his high school teammates and said, like, do you remember this guy? And what all of them said was he had this knack for leadership. And they all remembered this one game that they played. They were a terrible high school basketball team when in his senior year, I think they were one in 17. And they went to the Bronx, they packed into a subway car, and they rode to the Bronx to play their rival, a school called Fordham Prep. They were Regis High School, this free Catholic school in the city. and all of them thought they were going to lose the best player on the other team was this guy named donnie walsh who would play at the university of north carolina he would play in the nba he would coach in the nba he would run an nba he once ran the new york knicks right this was the guy that they were going up against and yet on that team because of tony fauci's leadership they won that day and all of them remember that game to this day like what reveals character a crisis but also high school sports like we all remember our our greatest achievements and our worst failures in

high school sports um and all of them to a man said i guarantee you that tony fascia remembers this game and so a few weeks later i was able to i wrote the story i wasn't able to get in touch with him but a few a few weeks later we did talk for another story um and i said listen i gotta ask you um i talked to eight of your teammates all of them swore that you would remember this high school basketball game from 50 years ago. Were they right? And he was like, are you kidding me? Of course. I remember everything about that game. Like he was like listing players from the other team. He was like, nobody talks about these guys anymore. It's like, well, yeah, nobody talks about them because they were high school basketball players in the 1950s. But

it sort of goes to show you that you can lead the country through Ebola and anthrax and avian flu and AIDS and this coronavirus pandemic. And yet you still remember your greatest win in high school basketball. That is an awesome story. And frankly, it's awesome that the teammates still remember that. You get the consistent story from all the teammates, not just him as well, right? It was incredible. Yeah. And I think there is some sort of connection between that raspy-voiced leader in high school and the guy who we were all trusting to lead us through this crisis now. There is a straight line there. This guy has been the leader of a team

that everybody else has looked to for his entire life. That's awesome. Before we go to wrap up and do rapid fire questions, Bitcoin, what's your position? What do you know? What do you not know? Give us some insight. I know almost nothing.

One of my best friends from college worked at Coinbase and is into it. I think at one point he gave me 0.0001 of Bitcoin as a joke. And I think I probably should have held onto it for much longer than I did. But it was a struggle for me. This sounds crazy, but as a Wall Street Journal writer to write the finance chapter in this book, basketball was sort of a breeze, but investing in index funds and stock picking took a lot of mental energy and talking to people and reading books. And so maybe the next one will be about Bitcoin. I should probably just listen to all of your

podcasts and that can be my education. Well, if you've got a friend who worked at Coinbase, I'm sure that you've gotten the hard pitch of, you got to pay attention to this. This is the future. Sounds like they even tried to overwhelm you by sending you some to really make you pay attention. Yeah. Well, I just dismissed him as my idiot friend from college, but that goes to show you how much I know. Trust me, for every one of our idiot friends who sends us a good idea, there's probably 100 bad ideas that they try to shove on us, right? Yes. And I've gotten plenty of those too. Before we go, two questions to ask everybody. What is your most important book you've ever read other than your own? Well, it's definitely not my own. I mean,

it doesn't matter if that's off the list. Probably Moneyball. I read Moneyball when I was in high school. And in the book, I write a little bit about something that I call the Moneyball generation. These kids who came up not having to change their minds about the way that sports worked. Moneyball was the way that sports worked. And to me, just the revolution that that has incited that book, what it captured. I mean, it's just a brilliant book. In addition to finding this incredible story, it's, you know, just every sentence is hilarious. The story itself is remarkable. And I think that book probably did more to shape the way that I see the sports world than anything else. I love that answer. Um, aliens, believer or non-believer.

So speaking of idiot college friends, um, I was in an, in, I was in a seminar in, uh, in college, which, um, had the greatest rule that I've ever been a part of in a class, which is the first day of class, the professor walked in and said, you guys can set the rules of this class. Like anything you want to do, we will do. Um, and he said, you know, um, I'm going to leave the room. You guys talk about it amongst yourselves for 15 minutes and figure out what this class is that you want it to be. And so he walks in, he walks back in and we have this discussion. And like the one stipulation that we had was that everybody got an A at the end of the semester. And he was like, yeah, that's what everybody always does. Um, but part of that class was every, everyone had to give

a presentation about whether or not, um, aliens exist and is their life on other planets. And, I did not give the presentation and there's a chance that I may have slept through part of the presentation, but the parts of the presentation that I remember were very convincing. So I do believe in aliens or life that is not on earth, but my convictions are not super high. I've not spent a lot of time thinking about it and I don't feel all that strongly about it. What are the answers you usually get? What's the breakdown? By far, I would say 98, 99% of people are like, yes it is more likely than not uh probably the most popular reasoning is like you know we would be uh selfish to think we're the only people here the universe is so vast right kind of all the

things that you would uh what what is the one percent of people who say there there are no such thing as aliens what is their reasoning uh everyone pretty much has the same reasoning except for one person uh every single person pretty much says like i'll believe it when i see them but why don't we discover them right so it's just like a like prove it to me type of mentality, um, or some variation of that, except for, uh, Josh Brown, who, uh, is a, a guy who runs, um, a, uh, a kind of a wealth advisory service on, on wall street. It's on CNBC all the time. Uh, he, for some reason, randomly blurted out and said, what are you talking about? Ghosts are more real than aliens. I was just like, I love it. I was like, uh, do you have evidence of

the, you know, like where, where does that come from? So we had some fun with that, but now pretty much everyone's just like well you know either they believe and just think that you know it's a numbers game and kind of a vastness of the universe or people are just saying you know i don't care what the data and probability is like just i'll believe it when i see it i wonder what like the rest of society would say i mean you're clearly talking to like a very specific type of guess i mean i would imagine that 99 of the people on the planet do not believe that there are aliens oh i think it's the opposite i think that actually oh yeah and especially now like people conflate a lot uh ufos and aliens so like the pentagon came out with ufos so like if you go

out on the street my guess is that most people would be like oh yeah the pentagon already like admitted that and you're like wait a second like no they didn't uh second of all you're you think that the pentagon admitted that there's aliens but you're not worried about that you're not talking you know what i mean like it's like this weird thing um and i also think uh people want to believe like that's the other aspect right it's like there's a tv show about that i don't know if you've heard about it, but the truth is out there and, um, uh, it's called the X-Files. It was on in the nineties and yeah. I have not watched, but I've heard of the X-Files. Right. Um, you could ask me one question to, uh, to finish up what you got for me.

Oh, uh, well, I, you know, this is actually something I'm curious about. Um, is, is there any sort of like, you know, I guess we'd never really defined the hot hand, but it's this feeling that like, um, you know, when you, um, have made a few shots in a row, you are more likely to make your next shot, um, in basketball. And that sort of applies to life. Is there any sort of hot hand effect in, um, in Bitcoin investing or how you see that market? Um, I mean, just investing in general, I guess there's a lot of people who kind of, uh, will get sucked into, uh, every investment that I make, you know, goes up in value, right? So kind of this idea, especially if you're like a day trader, and you kind of get on a roll. Investing, I always talk about like, whether

you're buying stocks, you're buying crypto, whatever, like, it's basically just a legal casino, right? In terms of what's everything going and, you know, deciding which you're going to put your chips on, you know, on the table in Vegas versus buying a certain stock, like, yeah, you might use different kind of explanations. It's pretty much the same thing, right? You don't, you can't predict the future. And so you kind of look at a probability, right? Just like you would do in Vegas. And so I think that the thing that people have gotten smarter about with Bitcoin, because it is a fixed supply, is like, how do you avoid that feeling? Right? Because that's actually where people end up losing a lot of money, right? Is you basically, you keep betting,

keep betting, keep betting, and like, oh, I'm gonna, you know, for sure hit this next one, let me really, you know, make a big bet. And then as soon as you lose discipline, house wins, and like, you get back that regression to the mean type situation. I think with Bitcoin, it, it has shifted people's mentality a little bit, at least the like, what I'll call quote, unquote, true believers, where it's like, don't spend, right, don't consume, just like do everything you possibly can to hold, and almost like this holding as a use case. And so it almost gets in this way of like, how do you lower time preference, where I think like the hot hand mentality is much more of like a high time preference thing, like, you know, it's a fleeting

moment, right? And so for like, you, you're like, hey, that one quarter in high school, like, let me get all my shots up now because like you know next game this might not be here let alone you know the next quarter and so like i haven't thought enough about it but that's like generally how i would think about bitcoin and like any hot hand type of phenomenon it's interesting because the the time element of the hot hand is really interesting so my hot hand in basketball was one quarter of one game right that's like eight minutes in high school basketball the next chapter is about rob reiner's hottest streak as a movie director that lasted seven years right so how do you compare eight minutes to seven years. The other thing I'll say is that I don't know if

you've gotten to this point in the book yet, but I do take a trip to Las Vegas casino and write about roulette wheels and the gambler's fallacy and how that plays into all of this. So I think you'll enjoy that chapter. Listen, I'm fascinated by the fact that such intelligent people gamble so much. When you're intelligent, you understand the probability and you understand the advantage the house has, yet you still go do it. There's obviously an illogical explanation as to why you're doing it. And I think that that gets left out a lot. Well, that's one of the beautiful things about the hot hand is that even after this paper came out by some of the smartest people on earth, right? If you were to ask any basketball player, is there such a thing as the hot hand?

They all would have said yes. So despite the evidence that we had at that time, which has changed in recent years, right? Sort of a similar effect has happened where people have had to overturn conventional wisdom again, with this really deeply counterintuitive pearl of wisdom. But, you know, we were told that something was true. And all of us said, No, that's not true. And like, how do we come to that conclusion? That was something that was really interesting to me. I love it. All right, guys, listen, please go get the hot hand anywhere that books are sold. An absolute no brainer. I'm really enjoying reading it. I think you guys will as well. So Ben, where can people find you on the internet

if they want to congratulate you, troll you, or do anything in between? So for trolling, I'm invisible. But for congratulations, you could find me anywhere. I'm at bzcohen.com. And that's also my name on Twitter and all of the other social media platforms that we all hate these days.

I need to get the invisible social media profiles. That's a great idea. All right, listen, man, thank you so much for doing this. I think people really enjoy the book and we'll have to do it again in the future. Thank you for having me.